My Life as a Toriphile

As much as I truly loathe admitting it, I don’t think I’d be who I am today if I wasn’t a Tori Amos fan. I was a teenage Toriphile. Go ahead, laugh. Today, Tori releases Piano: The Collection, a career spanning five CD box set. A box set, that’s a pretty big deal. It’s 15 years of this woman’s work, a huge chunk of her life. But it’s also a huge chunk of my life, as a fan...

Happy Workers
The first time I ever heard a Tori Amos song I didn’t even know it was a Tori Amos song. I’d never even heard of Tori Amos and I wouldn’t for at least another four years. It was 1992, I was 10 years old, and my mom took me to see the Robin Williams movie Toys. In one of the opening scenes, where you see how cute and fun the toy factory is, and how much the workers love their jobs, there was a weird, up-beat, but somehow ominous song playing. A woman was singing in a creepy, strained monotone. I loved it. I was singing the song for weeks, and I think I even asked for the soundtrack that Christmas. The song was "Happy Workers". The woman singing was Tori Amos. But I didn’t know that until years later.

Unplugged
1996. My CD collection consists of the Cranberries, the My So-called Life soundtrack, Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope, and whatever random pop songs I’ve heard on the radio this week. It’s a school night. I’m flipping channels and just happen to catch the beginning of MTV’s latest episode of Unplugged. Tori Amos. I recognize the name. It’s the woman who wrote the introduction to Neil Gaiman’s Death: The High Cost of Living, my favorite comic book. I’m intrigued. I watch this 36-year-old redhead grind her piano bench, sing songs about sex and God and the void between. I watch her play pop music on the harpsichord. I don’t think I’ll ever be the same.

The first Tori Amos album I buy is Boys for Pele, probably her most difficult and inaccessible work. But I love it. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before. I quickly buy her first two albums, Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink, and I listen to them constantly. I buy Tori Amos biographies; I hunt for import singles and bootlegs in the few indie music shops in my hometown; I check fan websites daily for news on TV appearances, magazine articles, her latest releases. I know almost everything there is to know about Tori Amos and I talk about her constantly.

More importantly, though, I relate to what I’m hearing in her music. I’m 14 and I’m just starting to think about the world around me. I’m thinking about my Catholic upbringing. I’m thinking about the fact that I’m queer. I’m thinking about what I’ve been told about sex and what I actually feel. I’m thinking about art and music and literature and their ability to inspire and provoke. I’m thinking about science and psychology, about Carl Sagan and Carl Jung. I’m reading Alice Walker and starting to understand racism, sexism, globalization. I’m starting to realize how important it is to know what’s going on in the world. I’m writing. I’m writing really really bad poetry, but I’m still writing.

Plugged
I saw my first Tori Amos concert a week before my 16th birthday, on her Plugged ’98 tour. My friends and I skipped school to drive to Charlotte, NC, just a few miles from where Tori was born. We got amazingly stoned on the way. The concert was like a religious experience. It was the first time she’d ever toured with a full band and the things they did with some of the older songs blew me away.

I saw her twice on that tour. The second time was in Raleigh, NC. After the show, my friend and I were waiting for my parents to come pick us up. The crowds had pretty much disappeared when my dad came strolling toward us from the parking lot. He said there was a small crowd of people near where he’d parked and they said that Tori was coming out to do a meet and greet. I thought he was bullshitting me, but the crowd was there. I squeezed my way through and managed to catch a glimpse of her: wet hair, small, Nike running shoes. She signed my tour program. I think my parents – who were pretty indifferent about Tori Amos – were almost as excited as I was.

Since then I’ve been to almost a dozen Tori concerts, but that tour was my favorite. To this day, seeing Tori play live, especially with the band, is one of the most awesome things I have ever beheld.

Venus
When To Venus and Back came out in 1999 I was a senior in high school and I was madly in love with a bisexual boy. He ended up falling for my best friend, Christina, and they were together for about three years. It devastated me. I think it’s the first time my heart was ever actually broken and it felt like my world had fallen apart. I listened to Venus everyday for that entire year.

Now, when I listen to that CD, I’m right back there. I feel everything all over again: the loneliness, the betrayal, the sickening ache. I even smell my car, my school, his cologne. Possibly more than any other song or album, To Venus and Back is bound up with a really painful time in my life.

Scarlet
Scarlet’s Walk was the beginning of the end. I was in college. I don’t know what I was listening to, but it wasn’t Tori Amos. I guess I was just sort of growing out of it: the angst, the faux religious scholarship. I wanted to hear about politics; Tori was still writing about religion. And Scarlet’s Walk, despite an interesting concept (a scathing look at post-9/11 America through the eyes of a Cherokee descendant), was just really boring, musically. It was softer. It was so...adult contempo. I didn't want to be one of those crazy, unquestioningly loyal fans. I started to get why so many people found Tori annoying. I stopped listening.

When The Beekeeper was released last year, I didn’t buy it. I didn’t go see Tori on her tour that summer either.

Renaissance
In an airport in Portland, Oregon. My flight has been delayed. I walk to a magazine shop and there it is: the new paperback version of Tori Amos’s autobiography. I’ve flipped through it before, started reading the first chapter and got really annoyed with all the metaphorical, spiritual mumbo-jumbo about archetypes. But today, for some reason I buy the book. And I read the whole thing on the flight to New York.

The next day, I put a bunch of Tori Amos songs back on my iPod. And the next time I see my friend Dave, I ask to borrow his copy of The Beekeeper. I put that on my iPod, too. I read somewhere that Tori is back in the studio, that she’s working on material that’s drastically different from anything she’s done in the past few years, that now that her daughter is older, she’s not holding back anymore.

I’m starting to get excited about her music again. I’ll probably never be the fanatic I was in high school – thank God. But I’ll always keep my Tori Amos CDs. I’ll always go see her when she tours. When I have kids, I’ll sing them "Black Dove (January)" for their lullaby. Maybe at my funeral, they’ll play a sweet, sad Tori Amos song, maybe "Hey Jupiter". And that will be my life, as a Tori Amos fan.